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Deloitte executive and mother of 3 advises next generation of working women on path ahead

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Deloitte managing partner Ami Kaplan and her daughter, Lindsay, outside the company's Midtown Manhattan office at Rockefeller Plaza. Ami Kaplan ascended the corporate ladder while still spending time with her husband and three children in their Saddle River home by narrowing her list of what was important.
(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

In sketching a blueprint for her life, Ami Kaplan knew she couldn’t have it all.
Instead, she shifted her focus to what mattered most: career, family and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

More than 30 years later, the Saddle River resident is a deputy managing partner at the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte a married mother of three and an admitted gym rat.

“Fitting it all in, to me, is about organizing your life,” Kaplan, 52, said during an interview last week from Deloitte’s office in the GE Building in Midtown Manhattan. “Sure, it doesn’t always work. But if you haven’t envisioned what are the components you have incorporated into your life, you can’t build it.

In recent months, executives Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo made headlines for addressing the work-life balance issue — Sandberg in her new book, “Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead;” and Mayer, in her decision to stop the practice of employees working from home. Late last month, Mayer again made news by doubling paid maternity leave to four months.

Kaplan has been dealing with similar issues since starting her career in 1982 at Deloitte, then called Touche Ross.

Mother and daughter on the cover of the April 1997 issue of "Working Mother" magazine, when Lindsay was 6 years old.

Long hours meant time away from the family, so Kaplan began building a support network at home, which included hiring a nanny, and at the office, she said. She delegated whenever possible and scheduled date nights with her husband, Howard — a managing partner at Deloitte — and more family time with their three children.

Kaplan’s success has enabled her to encourage young women just entering the workforce, most notably as a member of the board of director at Junior Achievement of New York, which helps mostly economically disadvantaged children and teenagers.

Joseph Peri, the nonprofit group’s president, called Kaplan “a fantastic motivator, especially for female students,” he said. “They see someone like Ami tell her story, and the time she put in to get to where she is. It’s very inspiring.”

Kaplan grew up about 30 miles north of Manhattan in New City, N.Y., with a stay-at-home mother, and business executive father who kept long hours at the office. As an adult, Kaplan said, she has tried to embody both parents.

In her career, sacrifice was inevitable, Kaplan acknowledged as she sipped from a venti Starbucks coffee inside a conference room on Deloitte’s 42nd floor. “But it was about overcoming the guilt.”

In corporate speaking engagements and volunteer activities, Kaplan said, she encourages young women and mothers to “build a life that you love. Celebrate the things you do, and by the way, your kids are going to be OK,” she added, turning to her 22-year-old daughter, Lindsay, also seated around the cramped conference table.

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When Lindsay was 6, she and her mother posed for the cover of “Working Mother” magazine on the fifth anniversary of “Take Our Daughters to Work Day.” Lindsay, who graduated from Boston University in May and now works for the public relations firm Weber Shandwick, remembers roaming the office as a little girl, “being treated like a young executive.” Kids were given notepads that were stenciled, “From the future desk of,” she said.

“Early on, my parents have established a culture of productivity in our household,” said Lindsay.

The oldest of three, her brother, Wesley, is in college and her sister, Madison, in high school.

As a kid, she would wonder, “‘why am I not sitting here watching cartoons?’ But they taught me that it’s important to be able to do an enormous amount in a finite amount of time.”

Today, for Mother’s Day, the family intends to celebrate the occasion at home, Lindsay said, including both her grandmothers.

While Kaplan said her family support system has been strong, it was a different picture in the business world when she started out, with far fewer women in leadership positions than today.

That situation has improved, although it’s far from perfect, she said. When Kaplan made partner at Deloitte in 1993, there were fewer than 100 women like her at the firm. At the time, about 93 percent of the partners were men. “I was a very rare commodity in financial circles,” said Kaplan, who has been at Deloitte for her entire professional career, and said the firm now has a strong mentor program to help young employees.

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“I was defining what I needed to do to raise my children, and the flexibility that I needed. Today, she added, “it’s expected that everyone can the flexibility to juggle multiple obligations...there’s a whole lot more personal freedom.”

There are now 1,100 women partners at Deloitte, about 25 percent. That is still far below the 3,575 men who are partners, in a company of 193,000 worldwide employees, according its 2012 annual report.

Women occupy less than 20 percent of Fortune 500 company board of director seats in the Unites States, and for women of color, the picture is worse. African American women account for 5 percent of all management positions, while Latin Americans comprise 4 percent and Asian Americans about 3 percent, according to a recent study by Catalyst, a nonprofit group that seeks to expand opportunities for women in the workplace.

Despite those troubling statistics, Kaplan said there are still more opportunities available for women today than when she started out.

“Helping to raise this next generation, I feel like the next decade that’s where I’m going to spend my time,” she said.